Lincoln at Gettysburg

Review

A coworker recently recommended this book to me, thinking I would enjoy it for my interest in writing, Lincoln, and language generally. He wasn’t wrong, I did like the book. I picked it up expecting something a little different from what it is. Wills book is a strange combination of technical (if that’s the word) and historical.

Technical, in the sense the Wills diagrams the Address and several other orations, but not in a grammatical sense. He uses the framework of the Greek Funeral Oration. So, we get a lot of Grecian vocabulary; words like epainesis and parainesis, logoslergon, dikaion, etc. It took me a minute to get used to this, as I’d anticipated more of a grammatical diagram. Still, I did find it interesting to read about Pericles and several other funeral orations.

Historical, in the sense that the author spends a lot of time talking about Edward Everett and his Oration delivered at Gettysburg, alongside other orators of the era like Webster, Clay, and Calhoun. The long exploration of Lincoln’s interpretation of the Constitution through the Declaration of Independence is fascinating.

About half the book’s length is in the form of appendixes, which I skimmed apart from the first, which goes through the differing versions of the Gettysburg Address that we have to examine.

I have to say, I’m a little surprised this won the Pulitzer, though I can’t give a good reason for that feeling. Maybe it seems a little too short, or a little too technical. I’m not sure. Ultimately, it did, and it’s a good book.

Notes

• p60 - The Greek authors develop these themes in different detail, expanding, contracting, omitting one or another. But most of the elements show up in most of the speeches, however altered the order or emphasis.
• p87 - There is no longer, in the Gettysburg Address, the assumption of LIncoln’s 1838 speech, that the only job is to preserve and hand on what the fathers accomplished. They did not accomplish the political equality they professed. They did not end slavery. They did not make self-government stable and enduring. They could not do that.
• p144 - Lincoln recognized a superiority of black “freedom fighters” to white shirkers from all mankind’s struggle: “And then [when peace comes], there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on this consummation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with indignant heart and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it.” [SW 2.499]
  • TB: I removed the inserted [sic] after “strove”.
• p149 - Language reverses the logic of horticulture: here the blossoms come first, and they produce the branches.
• p160, quoting Hugh Blair - The first rule which I shall give for promoting the strength of a sentence is to prune it of all redundant words. . . . The exact import of precision may be drawn from the etymology of the word. It comes from precidere, to cut off. It imports retrenching all superfluities and turning the expression so as to exhibit neither more nor less than an exact copy of his ideas who uses it.
• p161 - The spare quality of Lincoln’s prose did not come naturally but was worked at. Blair taught that it was not enough to be plain. The proper words must be thrown into prominence, even if that meant inverting the normal order of a sentence.
• p162 - For we may rest assured that, whenever we express ourselves ill, there is, besides the mismanagement of language, for the most part some mistake in our manner of conceiving the subject. Embarrassed, obscure and feeble sentences are generally, if not always, the result of embarrassed, obscure and feeble thought. Thought and language act and react upon each other mutually. Logic and rhetoric have here, as in many other cases, a strict connection; and he that is learning to arrange his sentences with accuracy and order is learning, at the same time, to think with accuracy and order. . . .